|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Course Criteria
Add courses to your favorites to save, share, and find your best transfer school.
-
1.50 Credits
This course introduces students to the vivid, sonorous language of Kreyòl, or Creole, and to the fascinating culture of its speakers. This intensive, beginning-level course is intended for students with no knowledge of Creole. In small-group teaching sessions, students will be prepared for conversational fluency with basic reading and writing skills, emphasizing communicative competence as well as grammatical and phonetic techniques. Our study of Kreyòl is closely linked to our anthropological exploration of how the language is tied to Caribbean society and culture. The course takes a holistic, anthropological approach to the history, political economy, and religion of Haiti. In addition to class work, audio tapes, music and film enhance the study of the Haitian language and culture. Evaluation of student achievement and proficiency will be conducted both informally and formally during and at the conclusion of the course. To give participants additional immersion in the Haitian-speaking environment they will have an opportunity to participate in a Haitian meal and in activities of Notre Dame's Haiti Working Group, including Haiti Awareness Week in February. Those looking to develop or improve their language skills are welcome to the class. The program is designed to meet the needs of those who plan to conduct research in Haiti or in the Haitian diaspora, or who intend to work in a volunteer or professional capacity either in Haiti or with Haitians abroad.
-
3.00 Credits
Students will be provided with the opportunity to learn how to become competent scholarly researchers as well as general information seekers relating to Africana Studies. An Information Literacy approach to obtaining and synthesizing relevant information currently available will be the underlying focus of this course. This will be accomplished by actively learning the University of Notre Dame library system's resources pertaining to a critical examination and discovery of research study in Africana Studies. Students will begin to develop an understanding of research techniques from the perspective of producer and consumer.
-
3.00 Credits
Discussions of the late nineteenth, early twentieth century literary and cultural movement of modernism often center on those qualities of the movement described in the work of early modernist literary critics, such as Harry Levin or Edmund Wilson. Such examinations emphasize the modern movement's experiments in form, structure, linguistic representation, characterization, etc., while paying much less attention to the role of the modernist movement in the larger context of a given culture. In this course, we will explore the significance of the modern movement from the perspective of American culture, as well as the manner and meaning of American literary participation in the movement. To that end, we will consider not only the work of authors generally accepted as modernists, such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein; we will also consider the role of authors such as Sherwood Anderson and Waldo Frank, of the early Chicago Renaissance (1910-1925), and a number of authors from the Harlem Renaissance. We will examine the work of these authors not only in the context of modernism, but also as it relates to many issues of the day, including progressivism, primitivism, race and ethnicity, immigration, cosmopolitanism vs. regionalism, and the importance of the vernacular, in addition to the question of "Americanness" and its importance to an understanding of American literature during this time. Considering these different vantage points in American literary modernism, we will try to imagine the contours of "American modernisms," and draw some conclusions about their significance within the larger modernist context. In so doing, we'll seek to arrive at a more comprehensive, more nuanced perspective on the meaning of the modern in American literature and culture. Course Texts: Edith Wharton, Age of Innocence; Willa Cather, O Pioneers!; Sherwood Anderson, Dark Laughter; Waldo Frank, Holiday; Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie; Ernest Hemingway, Torrents of Spring; F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby; Gertrude Stein, Three Lives; Jessie Fauset, Plum Bun; Jean Toomer, Cane; William Faulkner, Absalom! Absalom! Course Requirements: Two 10-page essays, one mini-presentation, one larger presentation
-
3.00 Credits
A close analysis of how notions are "race" explored in Anglo and Anglo-Irish literature.
-
3.00 Credits
A close analysis of women's life narratives and poetry, based on the following questions: How do women's narratives affirm or challenge cultural norms? How do concepts such as "high" and "low" art affect the reading of women's autobiographical literature? And can lines be drawn between fiction and nonfiction when studying autobiography?
-
3.00 Credits
This course explores the relationship between popular myths about the American experience and the actual experience of marginalized subjects in American society. It serves to make concrete a theoretical discussion of citizenship in the context of American Individualism and explores the relationships among social stratification, institutional coercion, and national narratives. As a long view of the last century, Homeland Security considers old forms of terror and surveillance evident in African American literature that anticipates and mimics the fear and anxiety in the nation after September 11. We will consider themes such as space, place, border, home, community, protection, and nationalism. The literature and critical essays under consideration straddle regional, class, gender, and social boundaries to facilitate our understanding of how African Americans within the nation create narratives of cultural fragmentation, exile, and alienation. In the process we will explore the condition of African American migration - from early-twentieth-century movements to urban centers, to early-twenty-first century migrations as a result of Katrina - and consider the way mobility may inform new landscapes of hope and displacement. Some of the texts we will read are Passing, The Street, Invisible Man, I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings, The Color Purple, and Eva's Man. These texts may be considered counter-narratives in the way that they stress exploitation, failure, disillusionment, and exile, but they intervene in formative debates about how to define a national identity and, to echo Langston Hughes, they too sing America. Course requirements: one oral presentation (15%); three 2-page response papers (10% each); one paper proposal; one 10-12 page essay (35%); class participation (20%).
-
3.00 Credits
This interdisciplinary course focuses on "cultural studies" as a critique of larger systems of domination and will introduce you to major voices of African American critical theory. Paul Gilroy suggests that, "popular culture always has its base in the experiences, the pleasures, the memories, the traditions of the people." Black Cultural Studies is interested in the wider sphere of critical practice, national politics and how popular culture can both resist and perpetuate the idea of America. While visual and literary studies have been seen as historically separate disciplines, we will use theories from each to study those forms of self-representation that defy disciplinary boundaries. With an eye on the way black popular culture is mythologized through commodification and rife with contradictions, we will examine the conflicted ways in which "racial" identities and differences have been constructed throughout U.S. culture. We will consider how new debates about the history of race have changed American literary, historical and cultural studies. We will put theoretical tracks in conversation with literature, music, visual art, the body, film and food and use these cultural texts as a method of engaging sustained social and political critique.
-
3.00 Credits
This seminar analyzes dominant American beliefs about the significance of race and gender primarily through the focusing lens of the experiences of women of color in the U.S. How did intersecting ideologies of race and gender attempt to define and limit the lives of women of color as well as other Americans? How have women of color responded to and reinterpreted white American ideas about their identity to develop their own self-defenses and ideologies?
-
3.00 Credits
A survey of selected seminal works of African-American literature.
-
3.00 Credits
Close readings of various 20th-century African-American literatures, with foci on how "black subjectivity" is created; the relationship between literature, history, and cultural mythology; the dialectic of freedom and slavery in American rhetoric; the American obsession with race; and the sexual ideology and competing representations of domesticity.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Privacy Statement
|
Terms of Use
|
Institutional Membership Information
|
About AcademyOne
Copyright 2006 - 2025 AcademyOne, Inc.
|
|
|